One of the many activities associated with the exhibition was Recode Decode: the opportunity to remix the exhibition’s ident created by Karsten  Schmidt, with the winner’s submission being displayed on screens in London Underground stations.

This is a great idea, and a lot of remixes are appearing in various places on the web in addition to the V&A’s website, especially Flickr and Vimeo, so it seems to have captured people’s imaginations.

http://vimeo.com/10885776

http://vimeo.com/9590019

http://vimeo.com/9496288

http://vimeo.com/8658509

http://vimeo.com/8636469

http://vimeo.com/8217274

http://vimeo.com/8217357

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ambgab/4262661874/in/pool-13813978@N00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dietapete/4193219903/in/pool-13813978@N00

 I wonder if we could borrow and adapt this idea for our exhibition?

Since then, we’ve held the selection process for Leave No Trace, and the exhibition is shaping up to be very interesting. It’s a shame we couldn’t accept more of the proposals because there were some great ideas, but space is limited and we have to select not just on the merits of individual pieces but also so that the exhibition works as a whole.

The next steps in preparing the exhibition are to compare costs with the funds available and talk to the Arts Council about the pieces we’d like to borrow from their collection. We’re also starting to think about the community elements of the exhibition, to involve a wide range of people in different ways, but with a few high-quality events rather than stretch ourselves too thinly and give people a poor introduction to digital art.

Anyway, there’s another meeting tonight at 5pm at the Burslem School of Art. If you’re on our mailing list, you should have received an e-mail reminder of this recently. Tonight’s meeting will have less of a clear agenda than the last meeting. Its main purpose is a general discussion of progress and ideas – more of a chance to catch up and ask any questions that may have arisen since the previous meeting.

I can’t promise to post on this blog quite as much as I did before Christmas, but I’ve been accumulating a list of links to interesting digital and multimedia activities, so perhaps for the next few weeks, this blog may become more of a referral site.

Remember, if you find anything you think is relevant or intersting to the Leave No Trace exhibition or the people involved in one way or another, feel free to add a post on this blog. (You’ll have to register first, if you haven’t already done so.)

Hope to see you this afternoon/evening.

It wasn’t until entering the exhibition that the three underlying themes became apparent; Code, Interactivity and Network. The code, whilst perhaps interesting to the code connoisseur, was little more than a display of pretty patterns that the average Joe Bloggs on the street might relate to screensavers or those annoying sound responsive illustrations on Microsoft Media Player. There seemed to be little concept behind what was essentially a demonstration of the different techniques available to Digital Artists. Then came Network; in the style of The Public in West Bromwich half of the exhibits in this section were turned off and re-booted whilst we were there. Of those that were working there was one of note ‘We Feel Fine: an almanac of human emotion’ where text found on weblogs including the phrases ‘I feel’ and ‘I am feeling’ has been collected and arranged for your perusal. By far the most popular section of the exhibition was the Interactive display. There were many fun digital based activities that you could explore, mostly consisting of wall based projections that responded to you moving past. Again there was little concept behind the artworks but that didn’t seem to matter when there were children and adults alike running around excitedly trying out all the activities.

The exhibition as a whole was made an exciting experience with the use of atmosphere. Darkened lighting and black walls created a sense of discovery; there was an anticipation of what new and exciting technology would be waiting around the next corner. It was great to see an exhibition focussing wholly on digital media but I do feel a little disappointed that all we were shown was essentially a demonstration of the different techniques available; would a theme have been too ambitious?

PLAYLIST is an exhibition that wants to explore the role played by music in the adoption and manipulation, since the mid Nineties, of obsolete, digital as well as analogue, technologies: vinyls, old computers, game platforms and alikes.

Here’s a link to Body Paint which is one of the items in the exhibition, and to onedotzero’s events website page, which lists all of the works.

If you weren’t able to attend last night – don’t worry. It wasn’t a one-off opportunity. We’ll arrange another meeting, possibly around the middle of January so that everyone can chat about progress as well as allow others to come along and get involved.

In the meantime, I hope lots of people will post on this blog, to start discussions and to provide links to interesting stuff.

The programme is simple: we start at 5pm, available for informal chat with anyone who wants to (light refreshments available), then a short presentation at 6pm followed by open discussion, ending at 7pm in time for the Blurb sessions at ArtWaves gallery/studio.

In brief, accompanying sixteen images of work on show, there are short statements from several of the artists, including a tribute to the role of Casey Reas and Ben Fry, the creators of Processing, whose influence is threaded throughout the exhibition.

The exhibition looks fascinating, and I for one will be going to see it as soon as possible.